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closed it too quickly to give him the chance.
    “Useless! Utterly fucking useless! I’m telling you, Mandy, I hate this godforsaken little town. These people get someone like me, do they care? Hell, no! I’m going to immortalize this place. That lab of mine will be a museum someday. People will come here to see where the mystery of death was solved at last!And this rotten little town spits in my face.”
    Mandy listened to her uncle rave. Outside the deputy’s car started up, its lights flaring briefly against the front window. Then its sound dwindled into the night. “It’s late. George. We’d better get some sleep.”
    “Sleep? I’m going to the lab. I’ve got work to do.”
    Her impulse was to try to stop him, but she realized that her efforts would only put him under greater pressure. She let him go.
    In ten minutes his Volvo was cranking up, then rattling off down the street. She heard its tires squeal at the comer, then silence fell about her.
    She returned to her bedroom. Too bad the door didn’t lock. The idea of staying alone in a house that had been entered as easily and recently as this one did not appeal to her at all. She hadn’t been in bed five minutes before she thought she heard a noise.
    It was a scraping sound, and it came from the sun porch. She sat up in bed, looking into the dark and listening. The night settled close around her. The moon had set, the crickets stopped. The world had entered predawn thrall.
    Again it came. Definitely from the sun porch. Carefully she pushed back the blanket and sheets and swung to the floor. Her first thought was to go to the kitchen and get a knife. But she’d have to cross the sun porch to do that. She went instead down the hallway, feeling her way in the dense shadows, until she had reached the entrance to the porch. While the stars rode and dry leaves whispered past the windows she waited. There was a feeling of sickness building in her stomach; her skin sang with the tickle of dread. She could not endure the suspense of staying here; she had to act. She would turn on the porch lights. They would surely scare away whoever was lurking beyond the door.
    The switch clicked loudly. And she clapped her fist to her mouth to stifle a scream. What she saw made her back away on shaky legs. Then she realized that those glowing eyes were an animal.
    Only an animal!
    She laughed around her knuckles. Her heart slowed its awful pounding. The cat meowed.
    “You poor cold baby,” she said, coming into the light. “Let me get you some milk.”
    A stray cat at the door. What a joke. She had been terrified. As she went across the sun porch, through the dining room, and into me kitchen, she turned on more lights. She opened the huge yellow refrigerator and found it almost empty. There was a dried-up sausage of indeterminate age and make, a package of Oscar Mayer cotto salami, a loaf of Pepperidge Farm Bread, and down on the bottom shelf a pint carton of half-and-half. That the cat would love.
    She filled a saucer and went back to the sun porch. When she opened the back door, cold air came in, and with it a very fast, very large cat. She spilled a good bit of the milk jerking back as the animal made its rush.
    It began lapping frantically at the spills on the floor.
    “You are hungry, you poor creature!”
    She closed the door behind it and put the saucer down beside its great head. It really was the most enormous cat. Black as sin, even its nose. It had a kink in the end of its tail and a ravaged ear.
    “You poor, ugly old thing.” Gingerly she touched its back, half expecting it to bolt. But this was no wild creature. It arched to her touch, then drank all the harder. A starving, grateful, and very domestic beast.“You’re so sweet!”
    She felt around its neck, but there was no sign of a collar. Her every touch drew a reaction from the animal. She found herself stroking it while it lapped at the milk, just to feel the undulating muscles beneath the soft black